May 31, 2005

Hot Brit band Coldplay and alt-country sweetheart Lucinda Williams top the regular Tuesday concert posting from Tea Party Concerts. Tickets for Coldplay at the Tweeter Center on Aug. 6 ($30.50-$69) go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. at the box office, Ticketmaster and teapartyconcerts.com. Tickets for Lucinda (nobody ever calls her Williams, do they?) at the Opera House on July 12 ($29.50-$45) go on sale Friday at noon at Ticketmaster and teapartyconcerts.com.

Also: Loggins & Messina at the Bank of America Pavilion on July 25 ($38.50-$65, on sale Friday at 10 a.m. at the Orpheum box office, Ticketmaster and teapartyconcerts.com); Dave Mustaine's Gigantour with Megadeth, Dream Theater and more, at the Pavilion Aug. 26 ($35-$45, on sale Saturday at noon at the Orpheum box office, Ticketmaster and teapartyconcerts.com); shows by Hillary Duff in Providence and "American Idol's" Kelly Clarkson in Manchester, N.H.; and the Gameriot video gamers' tour, June 24 at Avalon. Deets at teapartyconcerts.com.

OK, maybe the Boston news is a little less exciting than word that former FBI No. 2 man Mark Felt has identified himself in Vanity Fair as the legendary Watergate source for Woodward and Bernstein. But still. Mark Jurkowitz is quitting the media beat at the Boston Globe to return to the same post at the Boston Phoenix, replacing the departing Dan Kennedy. Who himself replaced Jurkowitz back in the 1990s. Both have been busy lately covering the troubled newspaper industry, especially developments at the Globe and Herald. Hard to tell if the latest announcement of cuts at the Globe had anything to do with Jurkowitz's move; he tells Editor & Publisher that "the decision to move back to the Phoenix has to do with the latitude an
alternative newsweekly affords its writer." Kennedy's leaving because he has taken a teaching job.

Curiously, I can't find a word in either the Globe or the Herald about Christopher Lydon's return to the airwaves last night with "Open Source." Scroll down to the previous item to read my take; Dan Kennedy also posted on it in Medialog.

The Herald reports that Waltham educational publisher Brown Publishing Network (no relation) is moving into children's books with a poetic take on the Red Sox, "86 Years,"which it likens to "Make Way for Ducklings."

Also in the Herald, T.J. Medrek has an interview with Newton native, singer Aoife O'Donovan, 22, who'll sing with the Boston Pops this weekend in their "Celtic Odyssey" concerts. Her dad is Brian O'Donovan, host of WGBH-FM's "A Celtic Sojourn." So naturally she's trying to avoid being typecast as a Celtic singer.

The Lowell Sun reports that well-know local painter Janet Lambert-Moore was driven from her home and studio by a fire Sunday. She is best-known for a mural of the late Sen. Paul Tsongas in the arena that bears his name. No word on whether any of her work was damaged, but the Sun says Lambert-Moore was not seriously hurt.

May 30, 2005

Of course his first show had to be a meta-show. Christopher
Lydon and company were minutes into the debut “Open Source” on WGBH when
they started gnawing on the question of what, exactly, does “open source” mean?

There’s a legalistic answer involving Linux licenses, of
course, said guestDoc Searls, but the software term has morphed into a metaphor for
“anybody can participate.” Podcasting guru Dave Winer wrapped open source and
podcasting and related developments into a single democratization of the media,
“the revenge of all the sources,” where us old-media “filters” get
“disintermediated.”

Lydon, a former New York Times reporter and WGBH news anchor,
sounded enthused. He's a giant step beyond the two-way chat of his old radio show, “The Conversation.” He's taking input from everywhere. He’s gone
native. He’s the Col. Kurtz of mainstream media. The faintly distorted, Dopplering sound of the WGBH audio stream, like a shortwave from the www.jungle, added just the right note of distance and strangeness.

The show’s topic of “Web 2.0” was set
by Lydon’s blog post: “The Internet just got cool again. Forget the crash. What
was a collection of static pages and commerce sites has become a living,
breathing conversation. A handful of innovations — tagging, syndication and
yes, of course, blogging — have only now become user-friendly. They’re changing
the way we communicate. And finally, the doomsday predictions about the old
models — of journalism, of marketing, of research — are no longer exaggerated. They’re
calling it Web 2.0, and it will probably change your life. A few people saw it
coming all along. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, they wrote.”

In other words, "Everybody can podcast," as Doc Searles said during the show; the threshold has been removed. There were jokes about newspapers' falling fortunes and Dan Rather's exit, pursued by bloggers. But there was also a higher-minded strain of talk about opening up the conversation to new voices: when blogger Dina Mehta called in from Mumbai, you got the sudden fresh sense of what they were talking about.

There were less high-falutin’ moments that illustrated
Lydon’s topic almost as well:Searles: I just got an IM from somebody – 'I’ll pay you $10
to mention my name.'Lydon: I’ll pay you $10 not to. (Laughter.)

It was thought-provoking talk, much of it. More about questions and possibilities than about answers and great results, though; this new medium has changed the conversation, but it's still not clear exactly how it's changed the world.

Lydon's return to the airwaves after four years was greeted with joy by those who saw his departure from "The Connection" as a dark moment in the history of civilisation. "To get Campbellian for a moment, this is the part of the monomythic heroic cyclewhere the hero comes back from his journey outward, and brings back the knowledge to the whole community," Lydon fan Stirling Newberry posted before the show. Uh huh!

The smart kids are always going to form their own clique. Reading the blog during the show, one learned that "Lydonistas" -- "veterans of the old Connection battles" -- have their own invitation-only message board.

Tuesday brings the debut of Cambridge-based Rounder Records' new Archive Series, featuring long-unavailable catalog titles and mostly deep-roots new releases. The titles will be available as digital downloads (with liner notes available as PDFs) or as limited edition CDs. The first three releases are albums by Cape Breton fiddlers John MacDonald and Theresa Morrison and the compilation "Minnesota All-Stars: Great Accordion and Concertina Music from the North Star State." All of this should be available at www.rounderarchive.com sometime Tuesday; I just checked and the site's not up yet.

May 29, 2005

In the Herald, Dean JohnsonreviewsU2's third FleetCenter show on Saturday night and turns in an essay on Bono's special skill as a front man. He also notes that "New Year's Day" and "Who's Gonna Ride the Wild Horses" made it into the show for the first time here. (A set list is here.) ... If the Globe came back for a third bite, I can't find it in my hinterlands edition or online.

UPDATE (5/30): Joan Anderman'sGlobe review of the Saturday show is in this morning, and like Dean she went for a summing up of The Bono Experience.

AP reports that a cell-phone ring tone appeared set to top the British singles
chart Sunday, outselling the new single by Coldplay by nearly
four to one. "Crazy Frog Axel F" is a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish moped. (There's no Boston connection, but I just had to share.)

In the Globe, Geoff Edgers has a good piece on small and mid-size museums in places like Worcester and Lowell that are having a hard time hanging onto their dreams for the future. (Related item here.) ... Ironically, the Lowell Sun's Kathleen Deely has a nice feature on the new 119 Gallery in Lowell, "A new digital media performance space that isn't just for MIT geeks," at 119 Chelmsford Street. New media, video art and music are on tap in a space now under renovation. The paper compares it to the Zeitgeist and Mobius. Opening is set for the last weekend in July. (The Sun lists a web address, but it points to a gallery in Mississippi.)

May 28, 2005

In the Herald, T.J. Medrek reports that Mobius Artists Group will present "Collateral Damage Noted" in City Hall Plaza at 11 a.m. on Memorial Day. The event will feature musicians performing a single note for each of the 20,000-plus Iraqi civilian casualties in the current war. As many as 100 artists may participate.

Also in the Herald, today's Inside Track reports that lightning rod former Judge Maria Lopez has signed a deal with Tribune and Sony for a courtroom reality show. Lopez stepped down from the bench in 2003 after her actions in a child sexual assault case made her, as the Track has it, "a whipping girl for law-and-order types." (She's also taken a pretty good beating from the Herald over the years.) The future star of "The Maria Lopez Show" is apparently unbowed; she's named her production company Sit Down Productions. "Sit down!" is, of course, what she angrily told a prosecutor to do during that controversial case - a video of her jabbing her finger at him helped make it a cause celebre.